I agree that release delays or longer release testing periods shouldn't hold back further development... but it does seem a bit strange to do a 'named' (even if it's 'alpha 1') release of the next version already.

I'm currently running 1.7 rc2 I think (well whatever the last release candidate was anyhow), but I'm tempted to go for 1.8 alpha 1 now... surely other people will think the same way, and this might reduce the amount of testing (talkback) of release candidates. Mind you, my 1.7 hasn't crashed at all so they're not getting any talkback reports from me anyhow.

This isn't a criticism, I'm just wondering if maybe it means the 1.7 release candidates get less testing. I suppose that will show up in logs so if it becomes a problem they can do something different next time around.

If you click on a tree column then it just alters the presentation (as in pre-1.4) but if you use the sort folder option in the edit menu then the bookmarks in that folder will be properly sorted. It was probably done to make the UI consistent with the rest of Mozilla and stop people wrecking their bookmarks by accident.

This is the behaviour I wanted to implement in the first place. However, it was considered as possibly confusing for the user, so I had to change it. This behaviour seems to be comfortable (at least for me, not sure if it will be comfortable for users, we will see).

Depends what you mean by "the" nightlies. There are nightlies for both 1.7 and 1.8 (and 1.4.2 as well actually). The pre-1.8 nightlies are in folders named "-trunk", the others are named with their numbers.

It's fixed in thunderbird but still no pasting of clipboard images into email. Outlook has it, netscape 4 had it even thunderbird has it but no mozilla mail.. Four years of waiting, promises of money to no avail. Still nothing.
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47838

Good point. But I am rather hoping a developer might pass by here and see that there are several hundred dollars pledged to the resolution of this bug. I have tried in the usenet groups as well but no bites. It just needs the thunderbird code porting accross to the mozilla mail I hope.

Everywhere on the net so far where I've read this news people are confused and are asking what happened to 1.7. This probably wasn't the best idea regardless of the reasons for the release and is just going to lead to a ton of needless confusion.

Have Final RC builds and Alpha builds of the next version really been coming out within days of each other with every release?

Looking through Mozillzine archives we see that Mozilla 1.6 Beta was release on Dec 9 2003. It Branched for 1.6 Final on Dec 19.
1.7Alpha was not announced until Feb 23. That's over 2 months after the RC 1.6 builds and over a Full month after 1.6 Final shipped.

Going farther back to 1.5 Final, it was released Oct 15 2003, 1.6 Alpha was released Two weeks later. So looking at the past few releases apparently this isn't how its been done for each milestone. Alpha builds were not announced until the release before it had hit Final. Note we are not talking about the 1.8 nightlies coming out, Mozillazine has announced this like it is a Full on Alpha. That's the kind of PR that's get spread around the web and people start asking what happened to 1.7 Final. Again I just think this is needlessly confusing in this particular case.

The difference here is that 1.7, like 1.4 and 1.0 (which had the same kind of overlap), requires more rounds of testing, because it's intended for a wider audience. 1.8 development is totally separate (obviously some of the developers overlap, but 1.7 fixes generally don't take too much time because so few are approved), so it moves along while 1.7 is being stabilized. Does that mean that 1.7 final should, in a perfect world, come out before 1.8 alpha? Perhaps. However, the question comes down to: if you are ready for an alpha release of the next version, is it better to wait until the final release just because of minimizing confusion? Perhaps on a schedule that is dictated by certain features being in certain versions (meaning dates are flexible). However, Mozilla's dates are generally inflexible (minus padding time for last-minute stabilization and holidays and such), whereas features can be bumped. Hence, 1.8 alpha 1 comes out before 1.7 final because 1.8 alpha 1 was scheduled to come out at that certain time and 1.7 final wasn't done yet. My company works much the same way (although we don't have 6 week cycles; we have 3 month cycles, so it tends to not overlap).

The problem here is that the cycle for 1.7 was streched by about a month or more very late in the process, due to the late decision to make 1.7 the next stable release (and not 1.8).
So, while the development of 1.8 is quite on schedule (I think), the development/stabilzing of 1.7 isn't in respect to the original plan.
If 1.7 was still a "normal" release, the final would already be out a couple of weeks.

Does all this mean, that 1.8 development should have been delayed or at least the release of the Alpha 1 ?

No. Who cares a shit for people who can get confused so easily. "Normal users" wouldn't use RC or even Alpha builds anyway. Anybody who cares enough to download regularly Mozilla Alpha, Beta, RC or even Nighly builds on its own should be bright enough, to understand the development process/cycle.

Maybe this leads to a little bit less 1.7 RC1/2 testing, but I cannot remember 1.7 to crash on me (leading to a crash report) even once, anyway. Those who had or verified crashes (and care enough) will probably go on testing new Nighlies until those crashes are fixed.

I've tested the upload functionality and it doesn't seem to be working. Probably the reason is that I use an Automatic proxy configuration URL. A progress window appears (very similar to the download one) during a second or so. Anyway, it's too quick to allow me to take a screenshot. I can see that the total size stated there is 10 kb, whereas the real size of the file with which I tested it is 749 kb.

1.7rc1 was fine but rc2 is clunky for me on linux. When a page is loading I can't do anything except hit the stop button. I can't close the tab. It's like the application 'blocks' when you make a request till it gets a response from the server - or you click stop, or it times out. So I'll move to 1.8a see if that's better, if not it'll be back to 1.7rc1 for me :)